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Britishness V: African-Caribbean Britons – “When it suits us we’re British…”

Kevin Massy - 11/15/2005

When ten-year-old Marcia Wilson arrived in London from Jamaica, she felt let down. Expecting to find the land of “milk and honey and fairytales” she had read about, the young black girl was quickly disabused and disappointed.

“I remember passing by Buckingham palace and saying "Oh my God, mum, you really mean the Queen lives in that dirty great building?,"” she recalls.

Thirty-seven years later Marcia Morgan-Ahiaba – she has been married twice since her arrival in the UK – is still here, and despite all the changes she has seen and helped to effect, she still feels a sense of disappointment.

Sitting in the common room at the Greenwich YMCA in East London where she works as a programme project manager for unemployed and disadvantaged youths, she presents a formidable example to her young charges. A cascade of dreadlocks spill out down her back, and a flowing floral dress and large dangling earrings suggest a proud, confident woman in touch with her inner carnival.

Mrs Morgan-Ahiaba acknowledges that Britain has come a long way from the early days of 1960s Woolwich, where she left school aged 16.

“I remember filling in a form for a job at an employment agency and getting to the bottom and seeing the words ‘No Coloured People,’” she says. “If we did get a job it was invariably a menial position and often smacked of tokenism.”

She is happy to have seen many of the barriers to black Britons come down, and feels a degree of achievement in the progress that has been made, having been actively involved in promoting the black British community for much of her adult life.

Last year she received the Community Award for Women at the Woolwich Simba Project, an African-Caribbean organisation at which she worked for over 15 years, helping black women with issues from immigration and housing to education and training schemes.

“Whether we like it or not, we have become multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-everything”, she says with a smile, but also a degree of pride.

Mrs Morgan-Ahiaba admits that there is still a long way to go before black people in the UK can feel themselves on a level with the majority of the population. She points out that blacks are still not proportionately represented in the professions or the education system, and that black children still learn “His [the white man’s] Story” instead of history.

These points are not new, and she trots them out with a perfunctorily – it is a mantra she has repeated thousands of times throughout her life.

But these are not the principal reasons for her sense of disappointment; she knows that from an equality point of view things are getting better, and for that she is thankful, although not quite yet jubilant.

It is the next generation of the black British community by whom Mrs Morgan-Ahiaba feels most let down. After her sacrifice and after so much struggle for equal rights and opportunities, she says it is saddening to see young African-Caribbean Britons without any sense of community or shared identity.

“One of the things I have noticed among the black community in Britain over the long term is that the people’s values have changed,” she says. “The principles are not there as they were in my generation. For me to see black people abusing the system and using different names [to commit benefit fraud] is very upsetting – they just have a mentality of take, take, take.”

She says that there is a tendency among the present black community to be selective when it comes to national identity: “When it suits us we’re British. When we go to pick up the income support and claim free housing benefits, we’re British. But when we choose, we’re not.”

Despite being a resident in Woolwich for over 30 years, feeling British is not something that Mrs Morgan-Ahiaba herself will ever admit to; there are too many connotations to the word, it’s too white. Neither does she see herself as Jamaican, having spent only a fraction of her life in the Caribbean.

A black African woman who lives and works in East London is the nearest thing to a self-definition at which she has arrived.

But for Marcia Morgan-Ahiaba, belonging is not something imposed on people by where they come from, rather it is a feeling that people bring to their surroundings.

She feels like she “owns” the events and the characteristics of her neighbourhood, and for her that is more important than a national identity.

“I strongly identify with Greenwich,” she says. “I’m patriotic when it comes to Greenwich, I own whatever happens here, and that means the bad things as well as the good. We got the [Millennium] dome, and despite all the problems, we got it, and I’m proud of that, because I feel ownership. But if there is a racist murder here, I have to own that too.”

This “ownership” is Mrs Morgan-Ahiaba’s answer to the debate on Britishness. She encourages her children, grandchildren and young people at the YMCA to support Charlton Athletic, the local football team, and tells them to be proud of where they live. Although she doesn’t deny that racism is a barrier to the success of the black community in Britain, she thinks that underachievement by black people and especially the younger generation is largely due to self-imposed restrictions.

“There is a constant cry that our black children are not achieving because of racism in this country, but we as parents are not looking at our children. In many cases it is the attitude of the kids which is preventing them from achieving.”

Unlike Mr Bunglawala at the MCB, she doesn’t lament the under-representation of black people in parliament, partly because the problem is not as acute with African-Caribbeans as it is with Muslims, but mainly because, in her experience, black councillors and representatives do no better than white ones when it comes to promoting her interests.

On the subject of integration of black people into mainstream British culture, Mrs Morgan-Ahiaba is equally unequivocal. While she doesn’t see it as a necessity for immigrants to the UK to take on and feel proud of a British identity, she is blisteringly critical of those who expect the national culture to mould itself to their demands.

“To me it is total nonsense that British people have to change to accommodate immigrants to this country. If white people went to Africa, they wouldn’t find a lot of people willing to change for them. My kids were born here, but I don’t think even they have the right to expect this country to change its culture for them.”

Mrs Morgan-Ahiaba doesn’t claim to speak for the black British community as a whole. She freely admits that her views are controversial and that even her children take issue with her outlook.

“I sometimes forget that my kids are British”, she says. “I say to them that one day we will all go back to our roots, and they say: ‘you know what, mum, we’re British, you go back to Africa if you want but we’re staying here’.”

And go back to Africa she intends to do in the near future – a place she has never lived and has only infrequently visited. She sees the same option open to many of the black people in Britain who complain that they are sidelined and disenfranchised, but says the truth is that “life is too sweet here” to leave.

This is not a little-islander diatribe, or an attempt to score political points. It is the strongly-held belief of someone who has earned credibility through experiences at the sharp end of the debate on national identity for most of her life, and who speaks with a justified authority.

She concludes: “These people must have taken ownership when it comes to being British, because some of the older generation of black people have been here longer than they can remember. Could you really leave Africa or the Caribbean and settle here for 50 years if you had not taken some ownership of this country? I don’t think so.”